An analyzer which includes an evaluation device and blood-fillable thumbsize disposable sensors intended to be inserted into the evaluation unit is known, for example, from the article by N. Aschenbrenner “Schlauer Blutsensor” [smart blood sensor], Spektrum der Wissenschaft, April 2002, pages 92 and 93. Each of the disposable sensors furthermore comprises a chip which, inter alia, carries information for the analyzer concerning which special program should be run and how the evaluation should be carried out.
For the evaluation, a blood-filled disposable sensor is inserted into the evaluation unit, which then drives a pump in the disposable sensor that passes the blood over a membrane of the disposable sensor, which separates the blood red corpuscles, and delivers it into a chamber of the disposable sensor. Here, for example, the antigens that are contained in the blood and indicate a disease when they are in a high concentration react with specific color-labeled antibodies to form a complex. The mixture containing the complexes is furthermore sent by the pump onto a prism of the disposable sensor on which further antibodies are arranged, which capture and fix the complexes. Lastly, a laser of the evaluation unit then scans the prism and excites the color-labeled compounds to luminesce, and a detector of the evaluation unit picks up the fluorescent light, the intensity of the fluorescent light being a measure of the concentration of antigens.
According to the known methods, quality controls in biochemical analysis systems have to date been achieved by measurements of individual control values, measurements of reference analytes and random-sample comparative measurements with gold standard measuring methods. These methods, however, only offer conclusions about a few sub-processes of the analysis process and/or only provide integral information about a plurality of sub-processes together. Only information that the measurement is affected by error is usually possible, and conclusions cannot be drawn as to which sub-process is causing the error. Although this ensures reliability of the measurement results, it is of only very limited use for quality control in the manufacturing process of biochips or quality control in the maintenance process of an analyzer.